Field of the Invention
This Invention relates to the forecasting of natural light conditions relating to weather, and more particularly to forecasting conditions for photography around the time of sunrise and sunset in advance, up to several days, of the desired photographic moment.
Description of Related Art
The concept of clouds leading to photogenic sunsets (clouds with reflected sunlight on them or filtered through them and typically warm in tone such as reds and oranges) is well known; however, the details of predicting the vibrancy of sunset colors based on weather data has long been considered too complicated a problem to accurately solve.
Current services in this field simply state that if it is partly cloudy in the traditional weather forecast then there will be a chance of a nice sunset; however, this is a simplistic approach filled with inaccuracy. Sunset forecasting is more nuanced than just there being some clouds and therefore this method does not reliably predict sunset vibrancy with any reasonable certainty or repeatability. As a result of this complexity, existing services limit their forecast to whether or not their will either be any clouds at all, and additionally if it will be partly cloudy, which in the weather forecasting terminology means around 50% cloud cover. Any additional complexity in the forecast to increase accuracy is disregarded from the analysis and thus the forecast is not very accurate.
The system takes a more scientific approach to forecast good light, wherein the method constructs a three dimensional model of the atmosphere and surrounding terrain in order to apply light path mapping, offsets, and masking to accurately determine if there will be cloud color. This allows the model to take into account multiple cloud heights and densities, haze, rain, complex weather situations, terrain, local adjustments, and over the horizon factors which lead to accurate forecasts which are statistically repeatable.